Facebook Secretly Working on ‘Facebook at Work’ to Compete with LinkedIn

Just in case you like to use Facebook at work, here is some good news for you. There will soon be a time when you can safely Facebook at work, because the social media giant aims to officially step into your company’s office through an ambitious project: a new website called “Facebook at Work.”

This new project aims to compete with Google Drive and Microsoft Office, according to people familiar with the matter speaking with the Financial Times. It will allow users to chat with colleagues — forget about other chatting platforms — and extend their professional network and collaborate with them over documents.

According to the Financial Times’ sources, the new site will be similar to the Facebook we know — newsfeed and groups — but it will allow users to separate their professional and personal lives.

As the inside sources describe the project, Facebook at Work sounds like it aims to step into a market in which LinkedIn is already present. The latter social media platform has 90 million active monthly users, which is far less than the amount of users Facebook has, a number exceeding one billion. However, the two cannot be compared at this stage.

For this project to come to life, Facebook needs to overcome some challenges:

To become an integral part of office life, Facebook will need to win the trust of companies and organisations, which will expect to be able to conduct confidential conversations and share important information on the site, without it falling into the hands of rivals. Many companies, concerned about falling productivity as employees spend work time checking personal messages and internet gossip, currently ban Facebook from the workplace.

You may recall that Facebook was often criticized for its privacy policy, but this year the social media giant took a couple of steps to regain user trust. It remains to be seen, however, whether this will be enough to gain the trust of professionals, companies, and organizations.